Analytic reference materials are used as standards in chemical analysis for determining the presence and/or quantity of a particular substance or analyte. Often, the analytic reference materials are contained in glass ampoules that are hermetically sealed. The ampoules must be broken in order to access the analytic reference materials, which are then usually withdrawn with a pipette or syringe rather than being poured. The use of ampoules can suffer from various drawbacks, including that ampoules can be difficult to open, can result in and/or contaminate a sample with shattered glass, and can be time consuming to empty, among others.
Most analytic reference materials are complex combinations containing many different chemical components. Certain analytic reference materials require multiple chemical compounds of known chemical incompatibility. Placing chemically incompatible compounds in the same ampoule causes denaturing and degradation of those compounds. The denatured compounds change an analytic reference materials' chemical composition, leading to inaccurate chemical analysis. Therefore, chemically incompatible combinations are often supplied in a kit having multiple ampoules in order to keep the materials in pristine form until use. This problem is compounded by increasingly complex analytical methods that require an increasing number of components to make up the analytic reference material, resulting in so called “mega” mixes that contain a large number of individual ampoules in an analysis kit. Each ampoule contains a single analytic reference material or a combination of chemically compatible analytic reference materials. The kits require the end user to combine the contents of the ampoules, in correct amounts, to form the final analytic reference materials. These kits suffer from various drawbacks, including the large number of ampoules which must be combined to form a standard solution. The ampoules are time consuming to combine, and are prone to end user error during combination. User error, along with chemical degradation, can lead to undesirable chromatographic peaks or other errors in the data collected from various analytical techniques.
Fluids are also sometimes stored in pre-filled syringes, but which typically contain a single liquid in each syringe. In general, two individual syringes, each with their own plunger, can be held together and directed to a single output. However, those devices are difficult to handle, are difficult to depress simultaneously, present size constraints, and cannot easily incorporate more than two syringes.
In other devices, multiple liquids are held in series within a single syringe, so that as a plunger is depressed, the liquids are released one after the other. These devices suffer from their own attendant drawbacks, including that they are not capable of releasing multiple liquids at the same time and are limited by the length of the syringe.
Devices and methods for dispensing multiple liquids not suffering from the above drawbacks would be desirable in the art.